Goldman Sachs (GS) on Solana

Goldman Sachs is working with a consortium of 21 global banks — including Citigroup and Bank of America — to launch a regulated USD-backed stablecoin, with an entity formation planned for 2026 and a target launch in H1 2027. The initiative is positioned explicitly as a bank-led project distinct from any central bank digital currency, prioritizing regulatory compliance throughout development.

The planned stablecoin is aimed at cross-border payments and institutional settlements, with the consortium structure distributing both build-out costs and regulatory responsibilities across participants. Goldman Sachs would extend its existing strengths in payments, trading, and balance sheet management into the digital asset space, with the shared infrastructure also designed to support potential future expansion into additional fiat currencies.

Goldman Sachs added three European stocks to its Conviction Buy List: Dutch payment processor Adyen, German energy company RWE, and German insurer Talanx. Analyst Mohammed Moawalla set a price target of €1,788.08 on Adyen — implying 77% upside from its recent close of €1,006.80 — citing the company's integrated platform, new US and Shopify partnerships, and agentic commerce opportunities with OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. For RWE, analyst Alberto Gandolfi assigned a €75 target (28% upside), pointing to grid-spending tailwinds, potential data center partnerships, stronger US renewable returns, and possible LNG profits. Talanx received a €141 target from analyst Andrew Baker, who described the insurer's Retail International division as an "underappreciated growth engine" with projected annual premium growth of 8–10% through 2030.

The additions coincide with Goldman removing four names from the list — Hannover Re, Enel, Wise, and Zalando. The conviction list moves underscore Goldman's selective optimism on European equities as the firm rotates its highest-conviction calls toward payment infrastructure, energy transition, and specialty insurance plays.

Goldman Sachs has raised its year-end 2026 gold price target to $4,900 per troy ounce, even after gold's nearly 30% gain over the past year, pointing to sustained central bank buying as the primary structural driver. The firm expects central banks to purchase an average of 50 tonnes of gold per month in 2026 — roughly three times the 17-tonne monthly pace recorded before 2022 — as sovereign institutions continue diversifying reserves away from the U.S. dollar to hedge geopolitical and financial risks. Gold has already surpassed the dollar as the largest global reserve asset, and Goldman's analysts note that gold's share in private portfolios remains low, leaving room for retail and institutional demand to add further lift.

The call reinforces Goldman Sachs's standing as one of the most closely watched voices in commodity markets. By coupling its central bank demand thesis with an expectation that a lower inflation trend keeps the Federal Reserve on hold through the year — reducing the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets — Goldman is framing gold's ongoing rally as structurally grounded rather than speculative. Rising demand for gold call options as macro hedges also features in the firm's analysis, underscoring the breadth of the commodities research operation behind the forecast.

Goldman Sachs is warning that the U.S. power and grid industry will need 500,000 additional workers by 2030, even as 41% of the current construction workforce is projected to retire by 2031. The firm's analysis points to a critical mismatch between the pace of capital deployment into energy infrastructure and the availability of skilled tradespeople — from electricians and engineers to electrical power-line installers — needed to execute it. The U.S. currently has around 45,000 active energy-related apprenticeships annually and would need to reach 65,000 per year just to meet transmission and distribution demands.

Goldman Sachs also flagged data centers as a major demand driver, projecting they will consume between 11.8% and 15.3% of U.S. electricity by 2030, amplifying pressure on an already strained grid workforce. As a longer-term offset, the firm projects humanoid robots could scale from roughly 20,000 units in 2025 to 1.4 million by 2035, potentially helping fill labor gaps in infrastructure construction, wiring, cooling, and security roles.

Chris Churchman, a Goldman Sachs partner who leads the firm's Marquee institutional digital platform and co-chairs its Global Banking and Markets AI working group, warned that heavy reliance on AI tools could hollow out the analytical foundations of future bankers. Speaking on Goldman's "Exchanges" podcast, Churchman said: "There's a huge danger here that in the era of AI, we outsource our reasoning to these models, and we have cognitive atrophy that stops us being able to reason from first principles ourselves." He drew an analogy to the way people have lost navigation and memorization skills with modern technology, and stressed that tacit knowledge built through experience — "you learn by doing, and a lot of knowledge is never written down" — is exactly what AI cannot transmit.

Goldman is actively integrating AI across its trading and banking operations, but Churchman acknowledged the firm has not yet fully determined how to manage the transition without eroding its apprenticeship culture. Junior traders traditionally develop expertise through supervised client interactions; automating those workflows risks eliminating the developmental pipeline that produces experienced senior practitioners. Goldman's challenge is squaring significant efficiency gains from AI against the risk of producing a generation of bankers who, as Churchman put it, are better at appearing thorough than actually being thorough.

Goldman Sachs analyst James Schneider is heading into Nvidia's upcoming earnings with a buy rating and a $285 price target — implying roughly 33% upside from recent levels — while flagging a counterintuitive pattern: despite above-consensus results in each of the last four quarters, Nvidia shares have fallen on the session after earnings every time. Schneider's Q2 and Q3 EPS estimates sit 6% and 12% above Wall Street consensus respectively, and he expects "a solid quarter with meaningful upside to guidance supported by tight GPU supply/demand trends," but he cautions the bar is elevated following a 12% August rally in the stock.

Goldman's preview identifies five focal points that could drive the post-earnings move: details on Nvidia's customer financing platform and capital allocation strategy, the rollout timeline for the Vera Rubin AI platform, gross margin trends, CPU demand from agentic AI workloads, and competitive dynamics. Of particular concern is Nvidia's $105 billion OpenAI data center guarantee and its participation in a $500 billion AI infrastructure financing initiative — commitments that Goldman says have heightened vendor financing fears among investors and represent a key overhang the earnings call will need to address.

A Goldman Sachs research team led by strategist Ben Snider found that while AI infrastructure companies have been clear beneficiaries of the current investment cycle — generating roughly half of the S&P 500's 31% year-over-year EPS growth in Q2 — the broader case for AI lifting corporate earnings remains statistically thin. Only 11% of S&P 500 companies quantified productivity benefits from specific AI applications in the most recent quarter, and just 2% put a figure on AI's direct earnings contribution, a share unchanged from the prior quarter. Goldman found "a small and statistically insignificant difference in earnings growth" between companies reporting measurable AI productivity gains and the rest of the index.

The research signals Goldman's view that the earnings payoff from enterprise AI adoption is still nascent, even as per-employee AI spending at median S&P 500 companies more than doubled from $5 to $12 per month between January and July. AI inference costs remain below 0.5% of S&P 500 revenues, and two-thirds of companies are redirecting existing budgets rather than adding net new AI spending — patterns Goldman notes are consistent with a market still in early experimentation rather than productivity harvesting. The bank observes that investors are responding by concentrating gains in AI infrastructure names with visible near-term earnings rather than betting on which broader businesses will capture the largest productivity upside.

Goldman Sachs' most recent strategic move is the acquisition of LCN Capital Partners, a step that signals a deliberate push toward higher-margin, fee-generating businesses within its asset management division. The deal fits a broader pattern at the firm: moving away from capital-intensive balance-sheet risk and toward recurring advisory and management fees, a model that analysts note puts Goldman closer to "quality compounder" territory rather than a traditional capital markets cyclical.

The bank is also positioning itself in large-scale AI infrastructure financing alongside continued strength in prime brokerage, which posted record industry revenues. Investment banking backlog has grown for multiple consecutive quarters, and Goldman trades at a forward P/E of 15.7x — well below its estimated fair ratio of 19.2x and the peer average of 30.5x — suggesting the market has not yet fully priced in the firm's evolving revenue mix. Risks flagged include geopolitical disruption and regulatory constraints that could weigh on returns and delay share buyback timelines.

Goldman Sachs published a report titled "Second Space Age" forecasting the global space economy will reach $1.8 trillion by 2035, up from approximately $55 billion in capital that flowed into the sector in 2025. The bank argues space is becoming "a new pillar of the industrial economy," citing dramatically lower launch costs — from roughly $55,000 per kilogram during the Space Shuttle era to about $3,000 per kilogram today — driven by rocket reusability. The forecast covers communications, defense, Earth observation, launch, and orbital infrastructure.

Elon Musk pushed back on August 18, 2026, posting on X that Goldman's estimate "will be much bigger," pointing to potential commercial breakthroughs in orbital AI, mass satellite connectivity via Starlink — now operating across 167 countries — and reusable interplanetary transport as factors the forecast may underweight. SpaceX recently reported $7.81 billion in quarterly revenue, a $47.5 billion backlog, and 78 launches year-to-date, underscoring the sector's accelerating commercial scale.